F. Paul Wilson - The Keep

With no conscious effort on his part, Glaeken's body set itself for battle—legs spread, the right slightly rearward of the left, sword held ready before him in a two-handed grip—as the corpses closed in. He did not have to do battle with them; he knew he could stroll through their ranks and make them fall away to all sides by merely touching them. But that was not enough for him. His warrior instinct demanded that he strike out at them. And Glaeken willingly gave in to that demand. He ached to slash at anything connected with Rasalom. These dead Germans would feed the fire he would need for his final confrontation with their master.

The corpses had gained momentum and were now a closing semicircle of dim forms rushing toward him, arms outstretched, hands set into claws. As the first came within reach, Glaeken began to swing the sword in short, slicing arcs, severing an arm to his right, lopping off a head to his left. There was a white flash along the length of the blade each time it made contact, a hiss and sizzle as it seared its way effortlessly through the dead flesh, and a rising curl of oily yellow smoke from the wound as each cadaver went limp and sank to the floor.

Glaeken spun and swung and spun again, his mouth twisting at the nightmarish quality of the scene around him. It was not the pale voids of the oncoming faces, gray in the muted light, that disconcerted him, or the stench of them. It was the silence. There were no commands from officers, no cries of pain or rage, no shouts of bloodlust. Only shuffling feet, the sound of his own breathing, and the sizzle of the sword as it did its work.

This was not battle, this was cutting meat. He was only adding to the carnage the Germans had wrought upon one another hours earlier. Still they pressed toward him, undaunted, undauntable, the ones behind pushing against those closest to Glaeken, ever tightening the ring.

With half of the cadavers piled at his feet, Glaeken took a step backward to give himself more room to swing. His heel caught on one of the fallen bodies and he began to stagger back, off balance. In that instant he sensed movement above and behind him. Startled, he glanced up to see two cadavers come hurtling down off the steps leading to the next level. There was no time to dodge. Their combined weight struck him with numbing force and bore him to the floor. Before he could throw them off, the remaining cadavers were upon him, piling on one another and pinning Glaeken under half a ton of dead flesh.

He remained calm, although he could barely breathe under the weight. The little air that did reach him reeked with a mixture of burnt flesh, dried blood, and excrement from those cadavers with gut wounds. Gagging, grunting, he marshaled all his strength and forced his body upward through the suffocating pile.

As he raised himself to his hands and knees, he felt the stone blocks of the floor beneath him begin to vibrate. He did not know what it meant or what was causing it—Glaeken knew only that he had to get away from here. With a final convulsive heave, he threw off the remaining bodies and leaped to the steps.

Behind him there came a loud grinding and scraping of stone upon stone. From the safety of the steps he turned and saw the section of the floor where he had been pinned disappear. It shattered and fell away, taking many of the cadavers with it. There was a muffled crash as the tumbling stone and flesh struck the first-floor landing directly below.

Shaken, Glaeken leaned against the wall to catch his breath and clear the stench of the cadavers from his nostrils. There was a reason behind these attempts to hinder his progress—Rasalom never acted without a purpose—but what? As Glaeken turned to make his way up to the third level, movement on the floor caught his eye. At the edge of the hole a severed arm from one of the corpses had begun dragging itself toward him, clawing its way along the floor with its fingers. Shaking his head in bafflement, Glaeken continued up the steps, his thoughts racing through what he knew of Rasalom, trying to guess what was going on in that twisted mind. Halfway up, he felt a trickle of falling dust brush against his face. Without looking up, he slammed himself flat against the wall just in time to avoid a stone block falling from above. It landed with a shattering crash on the spot he had occupied an instant before.

An upward glance showed that the stone had dislodged itself from the inner edge of the stairwell. Rasalom's doing again. Did Rasalom still harbor hopes of maiming or disabling him? Rasalom must know that he was only forestalling the inevitable confrontation.

But the outcome of that confrontation ... that was anything but inevitable. In the powers each of them had been allotted, Rasalom had always had the upper hand. Chief among his powers were command over light and darkness, and the power to make animals and inanimate objects obey his will. Above all, Rasalom was invulnerable to trauma of any kind, from any weapon—save Glaeken's rune sword.

Glaeken was not so well armed. Although he never aged or sickened and had been imbued with a fierce vitality and supernal strength, he could succumb to catastrophic injury. He had come close to succumbing in the gorge. Never in all his millennia had he felt death's chill breath so close on the nape of his neck. He had managed to outrun it, but only with Magda's help.

The scales were nearly balanced now. The hilt and blade were reunited—the sword was intact in Glaeken's hands. Rasalom had his superior powers but was hemmed in by the walls of the keep; he could not retreat and plan to meet Glaeken another day. It had to be now. Now!

Glaeken approached the third level cautiously. It was deserted—nothing moving, nothing hiding in the dark. As he walked across the landing to the next flight of stairs, he felt the tower tremble. The landing shook, then cracked, then fell away, almost beneath his feet, leaving him pressed against a wall with his heels resting precariously on a tiny ledge. Peering over the toes of his boots, he saw the crumbling stone block of the floor crash down to the landing below in a choking cloud of dust.

Too close, he thought, allowing himself to breathe again. And yet, not close enough.

He surveyed the wreckage. Only the landing had fallen away. The third-level rooms were still intact behind the wall against his back. He turned around and inched his way along the ledge toward the next set of steps. As he passed the door to the rooms, it was suddenly jerked open and Glaeken found himself facing the lunging forms of two more German cadavers. They flung themselves against him as one, going slack as soon as they made contact with him, but striking with enough force to knock him backwards. Only the fingertips of his free hand saved him from falling by catching and clinging to the doorjamb as he swung out in a wide arc over the yawning opening below.

The pair of corpses, unable to cling to anything, fell limp and silent through the darkness to the rubble below.

Glaeken pulled himself inside the doorway and rested. Much too close.

But he could now venture a guess as to what his ancient enemy had in mind: Had Rasalom hoped to push him into the opening and then collapse all or part of the tower's inner structure down on him? If the falling tons of rock did not kill Glaeken once and for all, they would at least trap him.

It could work, Glaeken thought, his eyes searching the shadows for more cadavers lying in wait. And if successful, Rasalom would be able to use the German corpses to remove just enough rubble to expose the sword. After that he would have to wait for some villager or traveler to happen by—someone he could induce to take the sword and carry it across the threshold. It might work, but Glaeken sensed that Rasalom had something else in mind.